Old sewing machine shuts down Old Church Street while police investigate

Viktoria Sundqvist

Published 12:00 am, Sunday, June 30, 2013

MIDDLETOWN >> A suspicious suitcase that turned out to be a sewing machine shut down Old Church Street for about an hour Sunday morning while police investigated.

Some passersby called police when they saw the item and thought it looked strange at the corner of the Adath Israel Synagogue property around 9:30 a.m., Capt. Gary Wallace said. Middletown police and fire departments responded to the scene and closed off the area. As a precaution, a bomb squad from Hartford was called in to open the item, which police said looked like a kind of suitcase.

Once the bomb squad was on the scene, it took less than 10 minutes to determine the item was an old sewing machine, Wallace said.

"There was no ID inside," he said. "There was no indication of why it was there or who left it."

In all, the incident was over in about an hour and the road was reopened again before 11 a.m., police said.